The automation of feeding and terminating electrical connectors has been ever-increasing in the connector industry to reduce labor costs and to increase speed and reliability of manufacture. However, with a corresponding ever-increasing trend toward miniaturization, difficulties continue to be encountered in handling large numbers of individual electrical connector components. Automatization, itself, has increased the problems of shipping, storing and automatic handling of such components. Specifically, many electrical connectors are manufactured/assembled in stages. Components may be produced, shipped and stored in intermediate assembly stages, and then the components are oriented and fed to automatic or partly automatic terminating machines.
One arrangement for handling such connector components is to use an elongated, generally tubular, hollow cassette having a uniform cross-sectional shape throughout its length and from which connector components are fed, such as feeding to automated terminating equipment. The cross-sectional shape of the cassette corresponds to the connector profile, and the cassette holds a serial array of the components. Feeding apparatus are provided at the automated terminating equipment or other assembly machine for unloading the cassettes and advancing full cassettes for replacing empty cassettes.
Another arrangement for handling such connector components is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,770,591 to Wright et al, dated Sep. 13, 1988 and assigned to the assignee of this invention. In that patent, a packaging tray includes a matrix array of open-ended component receiving channels formed therein, each channel containing a serial array of electrical connectors. A box-like container holds a stacked array of the open-ended trays containing the connectors. The box has an open end in a common plane with the open ends of the channels of the trays. The connectors are fed, one at a time, from individual channels in a tray, and a shuttle is indexed along a row of channels, one channel at a time, until the tray is emptied. Thereafter, an adjacent tray containing another row of channels is brought into alignment for unloading.
A problem with the arrangement described in the U.S. Pat. No. 4,770,591 patent, above, is the difficulty of manually manipulating the trays filled with connector components. The trays are flat and difficult to balance, and the trays conventionally are formed from thin plastic sheet material and, consequently, are somewhat flimsy. In addition, loading the trays in a stacked array, one on top of another, in the box-like container is difficult because the edges of the trays cannot be grasped within the confines of the box-like container. As a result, connector components often are disturbed or moved out of their proper stored positions, entire trays can be spilled and the connector components, in fact, can be damaged. The present invention is directed to further improvements in packaging trays of the character described above, particularly in providing means for facilitating easy manual manipulation of the trays.